![]() ![]() He might have seen some of the stuff I’ve operated and has enjoyed it or knows my reputation. We may or may not have worked together before, and it may be through a recommendation. I’m invariably hired by the director of photography (DP). How are you brought onto a project and what process do you go through to prepare? Do we pressure them by having the camera up close with the lenses wider? You’re reading each sentence of the script, listening to the director’s comments and interpreting the whole sensation of the film, then putting it through the camera, a mechanical object – through a piece of glass – and trying to tell a story in the best way you can. In any scene the actor is under pressure, but say for example that he is being interrogated, he is scared. What the camera operator has to do is interpret all of the words and ideas. ![]() You have a written page of script, a story, and the director has the vision. What part does a camera operator play on set, technically and in terms of creativity? ![]() As you can imagine, the turn around and getting it all going again each time took 15 or 20 minutes just to get the horses back into position. The way it was coordinated went really well and I think we only did about five or six takes per section. ![]() There’s a lot of dirt and fake blood being thrown around, and lots of smoke. We shot in three sections, with three individual takes, and almost all of it is real apart from where you see the horses in pain, or hitting humans or each other. The horse and stunt team took two weeks to put that together. There is a scene within a scene where John Snow runs through the battlefield and I’m following him with a handheld camera. It looks chaotic and hopefully it does look like the fog of war, but there was an enormous amount of homework put into it. We had an amazing director who broke down almost every shot. The scene was shot using three cameras, four at times, making use of telescopic cranes, handheld cameras, and lots of classic dollies and tripods on fluid heads or geared heads. We shot the entire scene in October in Northern Ireland over 23 days, and we were pretty blessed with the weather. The whole sequence lasts for around 18 minutes. Tell us a bit about shooting the ‘Battle of the Bastards One of the sequences he is most proud of creating is the highly acclaimed ‘ Battle of the Bastards‘ scene from Game of Thrones season six, where king-in-waiting Jon Snow’s army fights for the supremacy of Winterfell against the forces of the sadistic Ramsay Bolton. Sean took part in a themed Q&A session about the camera operator’s role at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, where he spoke about his work on Game of Thrones seasons one through eight. He is a veteran of television and cinematic productions around the world and is the current president of the Association of Camera Operators (ACO). Sean Savage is the cameraman best known for his groundbreaking work on HBO’s Game of Thrones, but he has also worked on films including The Last Kingdom, The Look of Love, and Snow White and the Huntsman among others. Those incredible shots were captured by camera operator Sean Savage in one hectic month in Northern Ireland. When it comes to epic battles on screen there are none more bloody or harrowing, that create the brutal reality of hand-to-hand combat as completely as the ‘Battle of the Bastards’ from the series Game of Thrones. ![]()
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